Album Review: Electromancy - Visions of Utopia
Reviewed by Eric Clifford
I normally try to sprinkle in what passes for crude attempts at humour in these reviews. I’ll not be doing that here. Given the context in which this work reaches me, and my unfortunately unenthusiastic reception of it, flippancy feels misplaced. The issue is that the story behind this project is metal as fuck, and because of that I wish I felt more positively about the end result. The tale goes that founding member Satyra was stricken with Lyme disease, which left them with nerve damage severe enough to prevent them being able to play their instruments. Not to be discouraged, Satyra developed honest to god robots to play the instruments on their behalf, along with an entourage of mannequins with LEDs in their faces by way of company in the lineup. It’s a triumph in the face of adversity, worthy of every horn anyone reading this can hold aloft, as well as a testament to the creativity and ingenuity of the artist themself. I need that to be clear. I need you to understand that I hold the musicians behind this album in great esteem. And I wish that I liked this album more because of it.
Visions of Utopia was not an easy listen. For how conceptually brilliant it is, songs last far longer than they need to and the mechanical, staccato spurting of the riffs got stale quickly. The pseudo title track (“Utopic Visions”) pistons away with industrial regularity for nine minutes at the same tempo with very little note variation in the rhythm with this unavoidable rigidity that got wearisome despite the varying skins that coat the cybernetics beneath beginning at 2.06 and 4.52. It has the feel of Fear Factory in terms of the robotic snap of the start-stop blitzes of palm muted tremolo, yet it’s far more repetitive than anything Dino Cazares and company ever played.
Both because of the difficulties I had connecting with the music itself, in addition to the inspiring calibre of the circumstances that saw the album delivered to us, I’m finding that I appreciate the album most on a thematic level. When the organic pain spills through the circuitry and the screech of “I want to heal, I want to heal...” breathes a soul into the machine on “Nonlinear Healing” is when the album hits it’s stride with galling, wrenching pathos. It’s clearly a personal album, and one that admirably countenances it’s hurts while rising above them – “sometimes all you can do is keep moving forward”; agency clasped in steel fingers, that luminous human spirit unimpeded by the robotics it expresses itself through, magnificent in concept if not execution.
“Thriving Cyborg” is... interesting. The first impression was something along the lines of an android Kyuss, particularly from 3.10 on with the glissando pilgrimage it takes between the notes of its riffs; cold sands swirling around the struts of the machine, too arid to freeze.
Within select moments the album surmounts the limitations that restrain it elsewhere; interesting meter spices up the constancy of its rhythms and helps it swerve the charge of sameyness. The song escalates and iterates cleverly, picking and choosing elements to play off one another in a shifting mirage of a track that’s still much longer than it needs to be and includes a really jarring “Aw hell yeah” sample at 7.02, but does at least demonstrate how effective Electromancy could be. There are two moments that break the song up at 4.56 and 6.50, so in total the song can be dissected into rough thirds, which feels a touch superfluous. The second section of the trio doesn’t do much that the third doesn’t do equally well, and given that the track stretches past nine minutes... could that second section not just have been snipped? Especially as the length of the songs really hammers home some of the irritations with the writing.
“Static Ecstatic” is painfully repetitive, which would be problem enough even if the track didn’t linger for eleven minutes. The riff that forms its chassis never really varies; melodic layers drape over it but they can’t effectively combat the monotony of it, with the drum beat maintaining an identical pattern for the vast majority of the song, (outside of the intro) varying only insofar as the song periodically and deliberately glitching. Things feel roughly as though they’re intended to be hypnotic while gradually building up to this spectacular conclusion in which the song dissolves into a mass of sparking, frayed wiring and shining metal flowing like liquid in a final burst of juddering skips and breaks in the track. This might have been effective but the song is so drawn out, so persistent, so committed to it’s own perseverance that it simply became tiring. Again, the only thing about it that I find myself unreservedly enjoying is the sentiment of it, it’s very existence has virtue solely because of the resilience inherent to it’s creation. The opening lyrics are a mandatory edict - “Get up...” comes the command, and I feel it, the unimpeachable truth of it, axiomatic and forthright, that no matter what you can arise and you can conquer whatever confronts you. But I wish that same indefatigable determination hadn’t extended to the song lengths as well.
I’ve been dancing a touch trepidatiously around a word like “boring” because it just feels so... dismissive. contemptuous, even. And I don’t want that to be the takeaway from this review but it's kind of is what it is, there was barely anything specific to the music beyond its thematic grounding and the sheer novelty value of it that appealed to me. Perhaps I’m the problem; as the introductory monologue says: “If at this point you’re not entertained it’s your own fucking fault”. Maybe it is. There are a lot of metalheads in the wide world; I’m sure that a host of them might well respond to this far more warmly than I have, particularly if their tastes range more towards industrial and electronic sounds than do mine. If you have the chance, ply them for their opinions. So far as my own two cents are concerned, I’m sorry – I couldn’t get on board.
